


leave me your stardust

by ghiblitears



Series: leave me your stardust [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Backstory, F/M, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Not Canon Compliant, Reconciliation, as of s6e3, galra can purr because i said so, i picked a placeholder name for keith's dad and i'll probably change it when he gets a canon name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 11:44:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13880169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghiblitears/pseuds/ghiblitears
Summary: Three times Krolia comforts Keith.





	leave me your stardust

**Author's Note:**

> I HAD to write about this family. Season 5 gave me so many feelings and there's already been so much adorable fan art of Keith and Krolia that I ended up indulging myself with this. @ dreamworks give us their backstory

**1.**  
  
Krolia has relied on her own strength from day one. It’s a requirement in her line of work, what makes the difference of life and death on a mission. She has to be able to trust herself and her own abilities, lest she lose herself or her teammates to the war. She knows what she can do.  
  
Holding Keith, however, terrifies her in a way she has never experienced.  
  
She stares down Steven, and the way he’s watching her with that fond smile and the teasing light in his eyes should be endearing, but all it manages to do is piss her off. He’s laughing at _her_ , a seasoned Galra rebel, for her maternal skills (or lack thereof) of all things. Keith, picking up on his mother’s discomfort, fidgets in her arms. He manages to free one stubby leg and kicks wildly, his tiny fingers digging into the fabric of her shirt.  
  
“Take him,” she insists, hating the note of desperation in her voice. “I’m going to break him.”  
  
“You’re doing fine,” he replies.  
  
“He’s going to get free and fall, or I’m going to hold him too tight and he’ll be crushed.”  
  
Steven reaches over to fluff Keith’s hair. “If he’s half you, he’s not nearly as fragile as you think.”  
  
It makes sense, and yet it doesn’t quite reassure her. It’s not like anyone would ever know she and her child were related just by looking at them. He looks nothing like her, all soft and pink and human. Galran hybrids usually showed a mix of parental traits, but that clearly isn’t the case here. And to top it off, he’s _tiny_. Far smaller than any Galran infant. She recalls Steven’s claims that he’s a perfectly normal size for a baby, and bites down the correction on her tongue that insists he’s not normal in the slightest.  
  
That last part doesn’t really matter, though, because he’s hers and Steven’s and that’s more than enough.  
  
Keith continues to fuss and Krolia holds him closer. She hums softly, gradually changing pitch until a steady, calming rhythm builds within her chest. He quiets at once, relaxing into the motion until he stills against her. That’s a feeling that will never get old, she thinks as she presses a kiss to the top of his head.  
  
The first time she’d done it Steven had thought it was hilarious, likening the experience to something an Earth animal called a “cat” did. Despite her insistence that it was an instinctive Galran calming technique, he still called it “purring”. She’d given up on correcting him. And she’d never admit it, but it was starting to grow on her.  
  
“See? You’re great with him.” He scoots closer until they’re brushing shoulders and looks down at Keith, whose wide eyes have begun to slip shut in sleep.  
  
Krolia sighs. “I still don’t feel like I know what I’m doing.”  
  
“No one knows what to do when they have kids.”  
  
She follows his line of sight and regards her son, small and helpless in her arms. Steven leans into her to rest his head against her shoulder.  
  
“Just have faith, Li. This is all gonna work out.”

 

 

  
  
**2.**  
  
She had known the day would come since she’d set foot on Earth, and she was still wholly unprepared for it somehow. The urgency it had previously held had been buried under her life here, to the point where she’d hoped it would never come. That was before she’d had commitments other than a mission, when she’d tumbled out of the sky headfirst into Plan A. When that had failed, she’d moved on to B, then C, and then everything after.  
  
If reconnaissance on Earth had been Plan A, then falling in with a human and raising a child was another alphabet entirely.  
  
The evening sun blinds her, the red light dying slowly on the horizon. Dust catches the wind and skitters past the dock, where her ship is prepped and waiting for launch. When she’d first landed and stowed the fighter she’d missed the rush of piloting. Her mission required grounding, for the most part, something she’d resented at first. Now, standing at the foot of the ship’s walkway, she would trade flight for her family in a tick.  
  
Keith seems to pick up that something is different. He doesn’t fuss in her arms, but Krolia thinks that his hand might be wrapped around her index finger a little tighter than usual. His quiet demeanour concerns her. Keith had proven time and again that he was a firecracker; whether that was screaming for attention at all hours of the night, or grabbing at any object in arms’ reach with his chubby baby hands, or pulling the edges of Steven’s beard on days he forgot to shave. Acting like this wasn’t like him.  
  
She loves him more than anything, and the fact that she’s never going see him grow up breaks her.  
  
Steven looks up at her, somber but calm. He reaches up to follow the curve of her markings with his finger, and then lets his hand rest comfortingly on her shoulder. “I know you have to do this,” he says quietly. “But I wish you didn’t have to go.”  
  
Every fiber of Krolia’s being is portraying strength, and she simply nods, trying not to show him how much his words hurt. “I want the Galra to believe that there is nothing here for them,” she reasons. “I don’t want either of you in danger.”  
  
Her communicator is stashed in her pocket, heavy with the information that Kolivan’s transmission had held. They needed to mobilize. Emotions had to come last. There was going to be an uprising, and she was needed on the front lines. Knowledge or death. _Victory_ or death.  
  
She’d keep all of it from Earth. She’d stand in its way herself, if needed.  
  
Keith whimpers suddenly, squeezing his small fingers around hers. He knows, she thinks, that this is goodbye, and holds him close. Emotion spikes beneath her skin when she realizes this is the last time she’ll hold her son, if not the last time she’ll ever see him, and she begins to hum. He relaxes on instinct when she begins, letting the rhythmic vibration lull him into calm, and it makes the transition of handing him to Steven that much easier.

 

She pulls her small family into an embrace, holding her last tethers to this planet in her arms.

 

“Take care of yourself,” she whispers. “And look after him”

 

Steven says nothing, just nods and buries his head in her shoulder.

 

When she takes off a few minutes later, she resists the urge to look back. If she does there’s no guarantee she’ll stop herself from flying right back to earth.

 

 

 

**3.)**

Keith’s rejection hurt.

 

The revelation of who she was had hit him hard, and when she’d tried to close the gap he’d stepped back, fear wrestling with hope in his eyes. He’d stalked off the ship immediately after landing at Blade of Marmora headquarters, making a beeline for the bridge. Krolia had paused outside the door and caught the tail-end of the barbs he’d thrown at Kolivan for sending him on the mission. To his credit, Kolivan hadn’t fought back, just let the anger and tension that had built up in Keith come to a head. She’d gone to the leader after and apologized, but Kolivan hadn’t looked regretful. He’d known the stakes of the mission.

 

Now that things had hopefully calmed down, she’d gone to find Keith.

 

She finds him on the navigator’s bridge, which is a surprise until she catches sight of him standing opposite a console and staring down a holographic map of Earth. Her knife — _his_ knife — rests on the dashboard. His arms are crossed, as if he’s holding himself together. He doesn’t notice her immediately, but when he does he pointedly ignores her, stares up at the projection of Earth that reflects teal in his eyes.

 

“Keith,” Krolia starts, “We should talk.”

 

He says nothing.

 

“I know you must be confused about everything—“

 

“How would you know how I feel?” he asks in a low voice. “You don’t even know me.”

 

That stings. Krolia edges closer until she stands next to the console to look down at him. He doesn’t meet her eyes.

 

“Please give me a chance to explain myself,” she reasons. “Keith, look at me.”

 

His eyes flicker up to hers. They’re Steven’s eyes, but the shape resembles hers more. She’d always thought he’d looked more like his father, but she’s beginning to notice similarities between them now that he’s grown — the same wiry, toned build, the same nose, even the same wolfish stare. To see him resemble her so much surprises her.

 

But she’d recognize him anywhere. From the moment he’d found her in the base, she’d known he was hers.

 

“I’m sorry I left you,” she says. His stare hardens at her words, but she continues; “It wasn’t fair to you, and if I could go back in time I’d change everything about that day. But I had to go.”

 

Keith is silent for a moment before he speaks.

 

“You could have stayed,” he says. “You _chose_ to go.”

 

That takes her aback. “I had a mission, Keith!”

 

“You know what else you had?” he says, voice rising with anger. “You had a family. You had a _kid_. A kid who grew up alone after his dad died, and who grew up believing that no one cared about!”

 

Something in her chest catches, twisting painfully at his harsh words. “I never wanted to do that to you.”

 

“But you did. That’s the Galra way, right? Emotions are a luxury.”

 

How many times had she heard that phrase? Drilled into her consciousness from day one, a mantle chosen the day she became a Blade. She’d hated it, always hated it. It was always said as if caring was weakness, as if love was something that needed to be culled in war. That wasn’t the Galra way. It shouldn’t be _anyone’s_ way.

 

“Where were you?” He’s crying now, bitter tears rolling freely down his face. “Why didn’t you stay?”

 

Krolia decides she’s heard enough. She closes the gap, stepping forward to pull her son into an embrace. Keith doesn’t fight her, and when she holds him close and begins to hum he goes limp almost immediately, instinctually calming the same way he had as a baby. His hands claw into her back, dig into the material of her flight suit as if to hold her steady, as if to keep her from leaving again.

 

“I left you once,” she whispers, holding Keith close. He presses closer into her, practically on tiptoe as he returns her hug. “I’m not leaving you again.”

**Author's Note:**

> come cry with me on tumblr:
> 
> espressopidge.tumblr.com (voltron only sideblog)  
> ghiblirey.tumblr.com (main blog)


End file.
